Wikipedia's Wales: Our Editors Aren't Fleeing, We're Still User-Generated

The Business Insider

Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, talks about his site's campaign for $7.5 million in donations on Bloomberg TV. However, he had to spend a fair amount of...

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Puhleez, Jimmy, I'm creating new editors as fast as I can!

Ja Ja

"Jimmy Wales, founder of Wikipedia, talks about his site..."

He's the founder. It's his site.

I guess another media story gets the big red X for accuracy in Wikipedia reporting.



Yikes! In the video interview, Wales says the 2009 fundraising campaign is "cranking right along".

Anybody remember the last time we heard that?

"We're just cranking away."



Oh, LOL -- as soon as he started talking about his for-profit company, Wikia, they played up the music and cut him off!

This was a great find! Mods, get this into the proper forum!

Ha ha ha ha. Classic. Good.

The reporting on this is just horrendous. I love the subtitle during the interview that proclaims:

WIKIPEDIA COSTS $10M/YEAR TO RUN

Sure, it does if you hire a bunch of do-nothings to sit around in San Francisco, watching the volunteers do 99.5% of the work, and still have enough left over to sock away a couple million bucks in the savings account.

Unless I'm missing something, the WMF spent $5,617,236 in fiscal year 2009 - and that's including salaries, travel, and "other." Whose tuckus did they pull this $10 million figure from?

Just Jimbo's usual shuck and jive, mostly. One thing I did find interesting was at 2.40 in the video, he claimed that the recent study that showed a net loss of around 49,000 editors had "significant portions" "retracted". Did this really happen, or is this just another one of Jimbo's many convenient lies or mis-characterizations? I seem to remember the study author later giving some further explanations on how he arrived at the figure, but I cannot recall any actual "retractions" by anyone.

The WMF's misinformation campaign about the rollout of flagged revisions "real soon now" to counter BLP concerns whenever they get media attention seems to have caught up with Jimbo.

I'm not sure about "retracted," but Eric Zachte's analysis of the statistical methodology seems sound enough. (There was an interview by WP'ers too, but I haven't bothered to listen to it.) It was reported in the Wikipedia Signpost, but Jimbo seems unhappy that all the news sites and blogs that picked up the "49,000 editors leaving" story haven't fallen all over themselves to tell the world how wrong they all were. Hey, welcome to our world, Jimbo!

The fact is, all of this is bullshit. Nobody knows. Nobody can know in a system that can have one person create 500 accounts, edit articles with all of them, and then suddenly vanish, or that can have a dozen or more people use the same account for who-knows-how-long. Nobody can know in a system where 100 separate revisions can be made to settle on the wording of one sentence, or where the initial version of an article can be posted and then not touched for two years. Nobody can know in a system in which people change names, take "breaks" lasting three years or more, and have large parts of their user edit histories vanish when articles are deleted.

I could go on...

I wish there were a way to slap some sense into these people, but let's face it, people like numbers. Jimbo and the Gang take unfair advantage of that, usually - if this is one instance where they got shafted because of it, well, turnabout is fair play.